Consumer Watchdog Video Wins a "Pollie"

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"Supercharge" won the Silver Award for web animation/web video in the Internet Public Affairs category. It was produced by SCN Strategies. Download a complete list of all the Pollie award winners here.

The award winning video was but a small part of a successful two-year campaign to raise online privacy to the top of the national privacy agenda and prod Congress into calling Google top executives to testify. The recent White House proposal for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and the Federal Trade Commission's clarion call for a Do Not Track mechanism shows we have crossed a tipping point and national policymakers are focusing on the need to protect our privacy.

We took our argument to traditional outlets like newspapers, television and radio. We held policy conferences in Washington DC and launched demonstrations on Capitol Hill featuring an ice cream truck and used mimes dubbed the "Google Track Team" to follow people around the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

The award-winning video satirized Google CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to dramatize Google’s information monopoly and make the case for Do Not Track Legislation. It used actual quotes by the executives and shows the two Google executives stalking a United States Senator through the signal in his Android mobile phone.

Who knows? Maybe next year it's on to the Oscars.

"Supercharge" was the third avatar-style animation aimed at Google’s intrusive online practices that we released. The two earlier videos lampooned then Google CEO Schmidt and were part of a campaign for more than a year to get Congress to require Schmidt to testify. Schmidt finally testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee in September, just after "Supercharge" was released.

The first video, “Don’t Be Evil?,” which premiered with a digital ad in Times Square garnered nearly 500,000 views. It featured Schmidt in an ice cream truck offering “free” ice cream to children while gathering information about them, seizing on Schmidt’s remarks about children needing to change their names later in life to protect their privacy. The video challenged Google offering “free” services so it can gather users’ information and then target them with behavioral advertising.

The second video, “Mr. Schmidt Goes To Washington,” made the case that the then CEO needed to testify before Congress about Google’s Wi-Spy scandal, in which its Street View cars gathered data from private Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries around the world. All three videos featured the key characters wearing iconic “Wi-Spy” glasses to dramatize the incident and focus on Google’s gathering our information.